It has to be the hour you can’t miss — the hour you have to see.
And it was. Before “fake news”, before we began looking at the largest setback in global political history, there was The Hour. The BBC’s The Hour was too easily dismissed as the BBC’s attempt to compete with Mad Men. But it was so much more than just a 1950s period drama.
It was an exploration of, as Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw) says in the pilot episode, “the mechanics of how we bear witness.”
The Hour tells the story of The Hour, a fictional hour-long news show in 1956 England. Unlike Mad Men, which it saw comparisons to frequently, the women of The Hour never had to learn how to fight their way into power. They started there. Bel Rowley (Romola Garai) starts the show as The Hour‘s executive producer. She stays there. Lix Storm (Anna Chancellor) is the brilliant foreign reporter with the experience to back it up.
And then there was Freddie Lyon.
There have been other, lesser characters that I have loved. But none quite like Freddie Lyon.
Sharp, obsessive, incendiary, magnetic. The Hour opens on just his face. Ben Whishaw delivers a master class performance in just the two opening lines of the show: “The news reels are dead. We’ve bored the public for too long.” Freddie Lyon is the show’s very heart and soul.
Ben Whishaw described Freddie as “irrepressible, unrelenting, indomitable,” and he was. Freddie wasn’t a nice character. Critics and viewers hated him during The Hour‘s time. He was too pretentious, too manipulative for the middle class readers of The Guardian. And that was the brilliance of him, of The Hour.
Freddie Lyon was a working class investigative journalist set opposite to the aristocratic, charismatic Hector (Dominic West): the show’s presenter (a role they then were forced to share in season two). Hector gets interviews with politicians because he went to private schools with their sons; Freddie goes to press conferences and lays out politicians for scaremongering.
That’s the tick about Freddie, about The Hour. That Freddie Lyon (called “the Bolshevik”; marked down as a potential Soviet spy) was unashamedly working class and anti-fascist. He is a journalist because he believes – desperately, wholly – that it is the responsibility of the news to report the truth. And the truth is that England is not a fair place; not a just place. (In 1956, 1957 or today.) Journalists are supposed to question politicians and hold them accountable. And he is dogged and unrelenting in that pursuit. That journalists need not be beholden to the system; least of all, to capitalism.
Which is the true tragedy of The Hour‘s cancellation. Freddie – a fictional reporter for the BBC – denounced the very thing the real BBC and other news outlets have fallen prey to in recent years: “money is king.”
And when money is king, the news – and by proxy, the citizens – cannot question corporations that grow all the more powerful within our governments.
So in short, the BBC cancelled Freddie Lyon and cancelled The Hour for the very disappointing and utterly sad truth. They still aren’t ready.
And it’s a shame.
Because imagine the season three we could have had: Freddie covering the JFK assassination, Freddie in Korea, Freddie in ‘Nam; Freddie interviewing Che Guevara. Imagine what they could have done.
But the loss of The Hour and the shame that comes with it is something I feel more acutely in 2017 than any other year since.
Freddie Lyon’s end comes in blood. The end of season two sees his body – beat to near-death by a nuclear arms dealer in bed with the British government – thrown outside The Hour’s studio.
In the United States, the president’s office has made threats to journalists and to those who leak information to the press. A journalist was body-slammed by a political candidate. He won the election regardless. He’s also, coincidentally, a tech mogul.
Freddie Lyon would be outraged.
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